1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a liquid crystal device and a projector.
2. Related Art
A projector using a liquid crystal device has been employed as an apparatus of a small size that displays television images and the like on a large screen. As a typical example of the projector, there has been used a projector, which separates an image corresponding to each of three primary colors of light (RGB (red, green, and blue colors)), forms an image for each color, and then composites the images again to form an image.
A reflective liquid crystal device is known as a liquid crystal device used to achieve the above-mentioned projector. The reflective liquid crystal device has a smaller gap between pixels as compared to a transmissive liquid crystal device, and has the advantage of obtaining a smooth image. Even in this case, it is necessary to electrically separate reflective layers, which are also used as electrodes of the reflective liquid crystal device, from each other, and a gap needs to be formed between the electrodes.
For example, in order to optically fill in the gap, as disclosed in JP-A-7-294896, there has been known a technique that provides a reflective material having diffuseness and reflectivity to the gap. Further, as disclosed in JP-A-10-177169, there has been known a technique that provides a reflective layer overlapping the gap in plan view and reflects light entering from the gap by reflecting incident light. Furthermore, as disclosed in JP-A-2007-133423, there has been known a technique that provides a reflective layer including a color filter to at least a part of a region corresponding to the gap in plan view.
However, the reflection direction of light, which enters the gap, is not controlled in any case of the above-mentioned techniques. For this reason, if the optical axis of incident light is inclined with respect to the normal direction of a liquid crystal layer, the reflected light cannot be used for display, and a gap region becomes dark. This phenomenon becomes conspicuous when the optical axis of incident light is inclined by about 10° or more with respect to the normal direction of the liquid crystal layer. In this case, since the gap region becomes dark, there is a problem that it is not possible to obtain image smoothness. Further, since effective utilization of the light is reduced, there is a problem that the brightness of the liquid crystal device decreases.